They are the licensed listings, not necessarily on air.
The 9C Willoughby site doesn’t even exist, so it can’t be on air.
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In Canberra the ABC and SBS stations have been removed from the trial multiplex. I’ll try to make it down south of Tuggeranong next week to check out the ABC and SBS reception down there.
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Dont know when it happened but Zed Radio(Sydney) is now playing 3CR(Melbourne) instead of 3RRR(Melbourne)
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3PBS has to be next, surely!
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I’m going to put fake money on a simulcast of Joy 949 in Feb - March.
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ABC budget doesn’t seem to extend to repeaters, I’ve personally had no problem around Richmond with mobile in car coverage with a portable digital radio. ABC and SBS have all made submissions to ACMA to manage their own overspill. 50kW OD with no beam tilt would assist greatly for further coverage ABC but may not improve in building and ‘down dale’.
Where is this coverage map? Can you make it available online?
Digital TV is not right for Australia, too many services crammed into each 7 MHz block. More error correction is needed, less ‘extra’ channels that cut that bandwidth down. That said, most high power VHF TV sites were 200kW ERP analogue and are now 50kW digital.
Correct. The survey methodology is clearly outlined for all to read.
There is a noticeable improvement in the Canberra ABC & SBS signals, not huge but noticeable in fringe situations. Yass especially so. Again, 20kW needed for proper reception in the town centre. Comur st is a digital blackspot at 5kW ERP. ACMA were told but don’t listen.
ABC is at 5kW, trial is at 3.2kW ERP. When the commercial broadcasters pull their chequebooks out for a new DAB+ TX rather than the very old equipment that was used in an early Sydney DAB+ trial, they might then finally move to their permanent channel block rather than their current location on the trial block.
Who is operating this station? What is the purpose of it?
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Text information for the SCA digital stations in Perth has been busted since at least Friday; Old Skool and Easy are stuck on an incorrect weather forecast, and Classic Hits is stuck on ‘Yes - Owner Of A Lonely Heart’.
With this issue, and ARN’s The 80s being off the air totally for at least a few days a couple of weeks ago, it seems as if the station management don’t really care whether DAB is even working or not.
Shame the spectrum couldn’t have been given to new operators that may actually care and want to compete.
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That is exactly true! New operators would have actually strived to make it a success!
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It’s not monitored by station engineers, ring the stations, ask to speak with an engineer and tip them off. Metro engineers from various employers have all said that analogue reliability is their primary focus and they don’t monitor digital as there’s enough other tasks to keep them busy.
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I’d expect the lack of power is entirely down to the vague planning for regional digital radio - which is essentially, use as low power as possible in SFNs to just barely cover the market and then try and reuse those frequency blocks in as little distance as possible.
The initial ACMA case study of a rollout around Sydney suggests that the Canberra commercial multiplex would be reused in Bega (based on Table 30 in the doc, it’s one of many options) - which sounds okay if you just think about the town - but the Bega RA1 licence area goes up all the way to places like Bateman’s Bay - and at the closest is only ~50km from the edge of the Canberra RA1 area.
Presumably once some of this stuff becomes more real by actually having finalised planning, we might start to see exceptions to the 5kW - but they don’t want to put stations on high power and then work out how to deal with the other markets- or have to reduce power after raising it and making it so people who had coverage lose it.
Unfortunately all of the ACMA planning seems to only chart interference, not actual likely coverage areas - so it’s hard to tell what they’d expect these transmissions to cover - particularly in cases where they just reduce the power assigned to a transmitter but don’t add extra ones to cover new blackspots.
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Yeah if I get a chance I might do that, especially since the main stations 92.9 and 94.5 are also not updating (on DAB, don’t know about FM).
Not blaming the techs either, management clearly needs to give them the time and resources to look after two broadcasts.
It does seem like a strange problem, I would have assumed the metadata of what’s playing is transmitted in-band with the audio stream, like MP3 does with ID3 tags.
Whilst agreeing with @Dingus that its certainly not a fault of the engineers that these things go unchecked, however, it doesn’t reflect well on the overall professionalism of the radio station for these issues to remain unresolved for as long as they do.
The ABC is no different, ABC Classic FM in Wollongong, which covers 300,000 people, recently had issues with left/right audio imbalance that was noticeable for about 3 weeks before it was finally fixed.
Therein lies the problem.
That shouldn’t be necessary in the case of no audio for days on end, as happened with iHeart 80s. A little something called an audio fail alarm would work. They’ve only been around for about 80 years. Why should the listeners have to tell a commercial operation something like that?! Absurd.
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IIRC, but they are only added in playout. Not final transmission.
They used to be connected to mod monitors. No audio, no carrier, alarm goes off. Simples.
Why aren’t the alarms just connected to off-air receivers?
Besides that, the audio on iHeart 80s must have failed at the playout or distribution stage given there was dead air nationally. It’s unacceptable for a commercial station.
I seem to recall once that there was a DAB/FM radio with input for a microSD card…you can get cheapies from eBay but this was a decent one. Am I going loopy or was this a product that actually existed.
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There is a similar product (link below), though it only has FM radio, but will record that to micro SD card.
I don’t know if this is available for digital radio, I haven’t seen one, but I wonder if DAB is encrypted in any way to prevent it from being recorded and copied.
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No.
I can record the output for many DAB+ stations on 9B and 9C here in Melbourne via SDR-J.
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